Karlien: I thought that when I refered to Jon Corelis' intention it would
be plain that my tongue dripped with irony. Apparently not. But then, I had
not yet become a category.
Let me try this out: whatever is in the poem, whatever referents, whether
the author (or translator) understood or was aware of what he was doing, is
part of the text (that's why as poets we're in the business of choosing our
words carefully). I don't see how these referents can be irrelevant or less
interesting to the reader unless the reader is similarly unaware.
I also think that you must yourself be aware how different a case the poem
of Khaled Hakim you cite is. Hakim, for his own reasons, writes, in a
phoneticized spelling (why, I wonder, doesn't he go the next step and use
the phonetic alphabet?)that doesn't appear to me to distinguish its
pronunciation, primarily in the queen's english, except when he is quoting
dialect, and when he does so he's precisely making a point about the quoted
speakers. He is aware that there is an implied commentary. Dialect is an
artifact with a history. Corelis is abstractly choosing a correlative
dialect as if it had only the most general meaning, i.e., that rural equals
rural, that the speaker in the poem is not us, and that appears to be where
he means its function as commentary to end. That he probably inadvertently
opens a whole other can of worms I should think would give him pause. Of
course, if he wants large numbers of his potential readers, even many who
are not hysterical Americans, to hear racist overtones, that's his right.
Seems a bit much to impose this on Theocritus, though.
>The editor chose the 'black-mask persona'. Weiss thinks that this
>'persona' purchases into something disturbing, he seems to thinks it is
>bad faith. I have no reason to doubt him when he observes it is not
>'authentic' (as in an informed 'dialect' rendition) and not based
>on the real. Then he, to me, goes way off course on the intentional
>fallacy, which has lead to all kinds of prescriptive comments at the
>address of the author, the tone of which seems to me somewhat hysterical
>no doubt because I do not live in America, yet are irrevelant to the
>far more interesting matter at hand, the Translation Poem.
>
>Yet his observations are the starting point of my reading, not the end of
>it.
>
>Karlien
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